Hey folks. It’s the last patch before Snowbreak’s second anniversary. We’re coming off of a relatively high note, as the recent release of Vidya - Celestial Swan has bestowed upon us a very strong support that at the same time doesn’t manage to break the game entirely in half. The game’s anniversary has also brought some interesting news regarding future operative releases, which I naturally have some thoughts about. All this, plus an apology to Marian - Riptide and an important personal announcement. Let’s get into it.

Swan Song

When the details of Vidya - Celestial Swan’s kit first came out, I’ll have to be honest and admit that it felt like a bit of a mixed bag. It seemed like that she would be really good in mono-element teams but completely useless everywhere else due to the way that her kit works. What actually happened was that she ended up being absolutely cracked in mono-element teams and still decent enough elsewhere. This made her at worst a slight downgrade and at best a massive improvement over Acacia - Kaguya, the former queen of universal resist shredding.

But at the same time, I’m not particularly bothered by it. Is it powercreep? Technically, yeah. However, it’s not so much that Vidya is some super-monster DPS enabler, and you can see that if you compare her investment scaling to other support operatives. It really is just that Kaguya has had a fraud of a signature weapon ever since the start of the game and nobody has filled close enough of a niche to her for it to become an issue. I suppose it’s pretty fitting then that the super-sleuth “greatest detective in the world” Vidya was the one to expose it.

So all in all, it’s a pretty darn good bounceback for Vidya after her underwhelming debut last September, if I do say so myself. The only concern one might have now is if she’ll pick up Acacia’s curse of never getting another alt ever again, considering how long she’s gone without so much as a glimpse of a new exosuit.

Riptide Redemption

Before we start this section, some paperwork is in order.

Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that Marian - Riptide has gotten a decent bit better since her initial release. Back then, she really was just a worse version of Enya - Exuvia with a sub-DPS gimmick that by and large was a DPS loss compared to just keeping your main DPS on the field.

However, things certainly have changed. We’ve gotten multiple new Skill DPS operatives that don’t shoot as part of their rotation, and as such, have a difficult time getting maximum value out of Enya’s kit. Most notably among them is Nerida - Styx Envoy who, while not a top-tier meta threat, finally gives Riptide’s sub-DPS capabilities a purpose as she’s able to meaningfully supplement Nerida’s damage and burst past triggers, one of the major factors limiting her usefulness in Neural Sim.

Of course, her raw buffing power still can’t meet the high ceiling of Enya in optimal conditions, and she still only buffs standard skill damage. But she now actually manages to find a useful niche in the meta, and definitely earns her place near the top.

Double Trouble

Among the many announcements made during this second anniversary news cycle, there was one in particular that caught my eye. Starting in November, all patches will have two new operatives releasing, with the second operative of each patch being freely obtainable in the same manner as Nita - Pulse from the Abyssal Dawn patch.

On one hand, this is great. Free stuff is always nice, and the accelerated release schedule will mean that fans of a certain character won’t have to wait as long to see them get a new alt.

On the other hand…

Well two things, really. To start, these additional operatives will work in the same way as Nita - Pulse; that is to say that they’ll have Auctus Drives instead of Manifestation levels. This is good because it means you can fully upgrade these characters for free, but it also means that Seasun has less incentive to make these characters particularly good. Going off of our admittedly small sample size of one, we saw Nita - Pulse release with a very cool concept but half-baked execution that ultimately left her a bit underwhelming. I know gameplay isn’t everyone’s top priority, but you do have to wonder: would you rather wait a bit longer to get your favourite character as good as it can be, or are you happy getting them sooner in a less-than-ideal state?

As well, does Seasun even have the production capacity to produce an extra operative every patch? It’s been common knowledge that Seasun is regularly barely able to get each patch ready in time (they’ve openly admitted this in the past), and the continued release of content that clearly could have used a bit more time in QA and playtesting (hey there, Splash Roulette) suggests that this has continued even through the expansion of their development team. So to then add on the additional burden of an extra operative release each patch makes you worry about how many corners might end up being cut to make future deadlines.

To be a bit cynical, Seasun makes no money directly off of these operatives since you get them for free, but they also aren’t a charity. They can’t be releasing a free operative every patch with new stories and voice acting every patch without expecting some kind of return on their investment. So where does it come from? The outfits, weapon skins, and interactive scenes that release alongside the operative, of course. This effectively makes the free operatives less meaningful gameplay content and more just a vehicle to sell cosmetics with. And as we saw with Nita’s release, Seasun is evidently okay with shipping a less-than-perfect product as long as they can sell you a cosmetics bundle to go with it.

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this, and those new hires from last year might eventually bring enough of a productivity boost to get everything done on time. But consider the equally likely (if not more) possibility that this isn’t the case, and that more operatives release with clear issues that could have been identified in five minutes of playtesting. Are you okay with your favourite character potentially being pumped out in a half-baked state to be used as what amounts to a cosmetics cash grab?

I know not everyone cares about gameplay, and that they just want to see their favourite character get new content. So in that case, why not just make more outfits, weapon skins, and interactive scenes for existing operatives? You can still write new stories about an operative without having to give them a brand new exosuit, and not having to design a brand new operative kit means more time and resources to commit to making what you do produce as high-quality as it can be.

At the end of the day, most of this is just speculation and I’m only an outside observer looking in. Hopefully things do work out; that would be the ideal scenario. But speaking as someone who truly wants the best for Snowbreak, I do hope that Seasun thinks long and hard about whether they’re biting off more than they can chew.

One Last Dance

Okay, there’s no easy way to say this, so let’s just rip the bandage off.

With the conclusion of Concord Ode and Snowbreak’s second anniversary, I will be moving on from Snowbreak. I will no longer be covering the game or producing guides for it, and I will most likely no longer be playing it anymore.

This is not a choice that I made lightly. I thought about this for a very long time, and ultimately came to this decision.

I’m sure most of you are aware of the somewhat-recent incident where I wrote an article about the state of the Snowbreak content creator program, and upon refusing to take it down, was removed from said content creator program. Believe it or not, this was not the reason for my decision to move on from Snowbreak. Or at least, not all of it, because while I wrote the article on the Snowbreak content creator program knowing full well the potential consequences of doing so, actually being removed from the program led me to take a metaphorical step back and re-evaluate how I actually felt about Snowbreak as a whole.

In the two years that I’ve been involved with Snowbreak, I’ve had the chance to meet new people and make many new friends. I’ve learned new skills and improved the ones I already had, all while playing a game that I loved. Being able to cover news, produce guides, and generally write tons and tons of words about Snowbreak for the past two years has been the opportunity of a lifetime, and I will always be grateful to you all for your trust and support that allowed me to do this for so long.

However, it seems that nothing good lasts forever. It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly the shift happened, but at some point in time, the core Snowbreak gameplay that initially got me into the game started taking a back seat. Challenge content got nerfed or removed, build theorycrafting became restricted with operative-locked logistics sets, and the focus of Snowbreak’s gameplay element started shifting to gimmicks and minigames. Neural Simulation, my favourite game mode in all of Snowbreak on which I used to spend hours every week attempting high scores and discussing strategies with friends, started to feel less exciting as new bosses became less fun to fight. The current schedule where the new boss of the patch would be on rotation for the entirety of said patch has also reduced weekly variety, which certainly doesn’t help.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m a pretty gameplay-focused person, and I didn’t really think too much of Snowbreak’s change towards more fanservice and ML story writing, either positively or negatively. It was what it was, and as long as the gameplay was good then that was what I cared about. But of course, that’s not what happened. Over time, all of the close friends I’d made playing Snowbreak started dropping the game as they became disillusioned or simply just fed up with the poor game design decisions that Seasun was making. The release of Chenxing - Jade Arc straight-up made a couple of people I knew quit almost on the spot because of the level of powercreep she introduced. Eventually, I was about the only one left.

All this is to say that when I did take that step back, I realized that I was more or less on my own now, playing a game that I wasn’t even sure if I still enjoyed.

Maybe it’s a bit selfish of me to quit just because I’m not having fun anymore. But while I was thinking about how I really felt about Snowbreak, I was reminded of a phrase that gets said a lot in discussions about the game, a sort of community mantra. More or less paraphrased:

“If you don’t like the direction that Snowbreak is taking, then you’re free to leave.”

In my time covering Snowbreak, I’ve been an active advocate for responsible game design decisions and a focus on Snowbreak’s original core gameplay, its shooter aspect. Snowbreak does still refer to itself as an “RPG shooter game” in online store listings, after all. But well, I don’t know. Maybe it’s time that I fall in line and do as the Romans do. When in Rome, after all.

So yeah, I guess that’s it, really. I don’t see myself enjoying the direction that Snowbreak is taking, away from its original core gameplay and towards minigames and non-content. If that’s something that appeals to you, then I genuinely do hope that you continue to enjoy your time playing Snowbreak. But it’s not for me. So I’m leaving.

At any rate, now’s about as good a time as any for me to make my departure. Seasun seems to finally have gotten their act together in making event news available to global audiences in a timely manner, to the extent that I’ve stopped making my usual Twitter event details threads because Seasun was able to post the details at the same time as CN side. They’ve even managed to get the upcoming Katya - Rhapsody’s gameplay preview posted to global before the patch dropped, something that they haven’t done since Mauxir - Shadow Ka one and a half years ago. I’d like to hope that Snowbreak news reporting will be handled well by Seasun going forward.

As for gameplay analysis, you’ll still have ArchiveRisen. He is an incredibly talented and hardworking guy, and quite likely the smartest person in the Snowbreak community. I go to him all the time for help figuring out gameplay interactions, fixing issues with calculations, and generally sanity-checking my work. I have full faith in his continued ability to make gameplay analysis as good as mine if not even better. Please check him out if you care about Snowbreak’s gameplay. You’ll be in good hands.

Overall, I don’t regret the time I spent involved with Snowbreak. It’s been a highlight of my life, and if I had the chance to do it all again, I happily would. However, it’s also clear to me that this isn’t something that I can do forever. But before I do ride off into the sunset, we’ve got one more patch to spend together. It’s Snowbreak’s second anniversary! Let’s make it one to remember.

Tier List Updates

View the full tier list here.

Vidya’s investigation reveals that she is in fact a top-shelf support capable of hanging with the best. While she truly shines when used in a mono-element team, she works well enough even in mixed-element compositions to earn her spot at the top.

I’ve become a bit more bullish on Nerida’s boss-popping capabilities as I’ve seen more of what she can do, so she gets an uptick in her Sim rating.