The Black Banquet Post-Mortem
With a day and change between us and the Black Banquet ending, I wanted to write up a thing talking in a bit more depth about my feelings on the event, as well as some constructive criticism on what I'd want to see learned from it for whatever next year's anniversary will be.
To start, I want to go over some pros before we get to the cons. It's not just a futile attempt at even-handedness, though, I do genuinely think there were some good elements that should be highlighted in comparison to the (admittedly much more front and centre) bad parts that I'll get to afterwards.
For no particular reason other than that I like this format, I'll put the pros in bullet points, but the cons are probably going to be a bit more lengthy.
- First off, and likely the least controversial comment imaginable, the presentation was fantastic. The visuals in-trial, the cosmetics (especially their descriptions this year, Dwight's was neat to read), and the neat little 3D object viewer that unlocked little lore teases were all really good and I do think that is worth mentioning. Good stuff there, all my gripes with this event are mechanical.
- Slight addendum to the above, I love that Tryks was mentioned again. Few people but me care, I'm sure, but contextualising Tryks not being here as her actively avoiding something she thinks is over the line was interesting.
- There are heavy asterisks on this one, but I liked the shape of this event, I thought the "courses" idea was interesting and I liked that - at least for survivors - this event had more structure and decisionmaking than previous ones. Again, my gripes are mechanical and I'll get into that below, but the overall shape of the Black Banquet was pretty solid and I'd like to see it repeated.
- Specifically, I think the invisibility was a good and well designed event ability in a vacuum. It was strong, so worth using, but could be used poorly and could be answered by the opponent. It's the only effect that I'd actually like to see come back.
That's all I wanted to highlight before getting into the meat of things. There were elements of this event to like, but they were overshadowed by the real brunt of the event's issues. Put simply, this event wasn't very fun to play, but just saying that isn't very constructive so I want to expand on it.
There are three major problems I had with this event, followed by cascading smaller ones that exacerbated the big ones. Those are:
- Survivors got far more interesting effects to play with; survivors had all the structure-defining gameplay with morsels and banquet tables, and they also had all the effects that actually opened up new gameplay scenarios, for lack of a better term.
- The one major thing killers got, the poison, was incredibly strong but incredibly boring. Throwing it on a survivor basically guaranteed a hit nine times out of ten, without much the survivor could've done to outplay or the killer could've done to really play around it intelligently. Throw bottle, follow survivor, hit them when they're forced to walk.
- Specifically the instant team-heal from filling a banquet was so unbelievably unfun and frustrating to face. The other effects ranged from kinda whatever to strong but reasonable, but the heal in particular was so aggressively awful to play against that it warrants a big bullet point here instead of being collected in smaller issues with the effects— not to mention that it was the one universal effect, so there wasn't any avoiding it.
With that out of the way I want to clarify that I don't think the survivor's array of effects were all stellar and fun to play with. The armour/invincibility was kinda bad due to the long startup and limited duration (the latter of which is obviously fair for balance, to be clear), the sprint was relatively boring, and consuming the morsel to see pallets wasn't very interesting either.
What I am saying though is that the survivor effects were at least designed to be interesting, especially the invincibility, and were underwhelming (when applicable) because of balancing. Given how this event tilted towards survivors overall I'm not complaining about that in a vacuum, but it's still valuable feedback.
This is kind of the big issue overall, here. The problem with the Black Banquet, outside of stuff like the free heal (and honestly the unbreakable pallets too) being too strong in ways that could easily be iterated on for next time (alongside other small pain points like the portals becoming randomised making them way, way stronger for survivors unfairly), was plainly and simply that the interesting and structure-defining gameplay was only given to one side.
Being constructive, if the Black Banquet comes back next year - and the aesthetics/theme were great, I'd be totally down for that - then it needs to more evenly split its interesting mechanics across both roles.
To clarify again: I don't actually care if an event balance-wise leans to one side more than another, as long as it doesn't tilt too far (like this one did) and as long as both sides at least have interesting toys to play with (like this one decidedly didn't).
A good point of comparison is the original Bone Chill, where only survivors got to play with the snowmen. They didn't offer much of a competitive advantage (they didn't, I was there, I've had this argument), but that doesn't really matter because it still only left one role able to play around. The current Bone Chill, with omni-role snowmen and a shared snowball fight mechanic, is basically perfect, and I have faith the Black Banquet can get there too with iteration.
So, TL;DR repetition: Both sides need fun toys to play with, and generally speaking the actual strength of those toys probably should be toned down for both sides as well, because wow did some of those effects suck to play against.
I'm not gonna pitch too specific options for what this should look like, but even something as simple as engaging with the morsel/table system to get Undetectable at least opens up gameplay options for the killer, so it doesn't have to be as fancy and unique as the invisibility.
Also bring Tryks back for more commentary on how awful the banquet is next time please and thank you :)
Comments
Amen for the grand return of Tryks and her humourous commentary
I'd be fine with her being in out-of-game material again like she was this time, but I neeeeed to see more of her…
Yeah, they should take notes of the 4 horsemen of this event, and try not to recreate them in the future
The 4 horsemen being:
1. Unbreakable Pallets
2. Completely random portals for 60s during meal time
3. Team wide global heal
4. Killer's poison thrown directly at survivor
All 4 of these had kind of "play with yourself" design, where the other side doesn't really have options to counter them, outside of specific scenarios.
It's honestly kind of funny how design and presentation of the event were polar opposites