What we can learn from Synthetik 1 (Or, My love for active items)

First impressions of Synthetik 2 are really conflicting. On one hand, I love a lot of the new ideas for items/classes and am looking forward to playing them and learning them. New environments can be really fun to walk around in. However, there is something that I really heavily disagree on. And it's the non implementation of active items outside of your starting kit. For some, Synthetik 1 had an item overload issue where some players felt uncomfortable having 7 active items. Many felt like they couldn't get value out of them and were instead a lot more comfortable with 2-3 main ones and everything else being passive. Fortunately for them, Synthetik's design allowed for this. There are a plethora of both active and non active items to form a build around and to craft an identity around. If you wanted to have a bunch of tools for a situation you could run around with all of your actives or if you wanted to be braindead you could fill up with passives. It was relatively easy to side either direction due to the quantity of both and the nature of tokens. Synthetik 2 allows for none of this. The identity of your run will be heavily determined from the get go. Every active item you get you start with. There is no swapping them out. This limits possibilities greatly and will have an over arching effect of making each run feel less unique. It's hard to build an identity around stuff that is proccing independently of the player. Less direct control and more randomness tends to lead to less mastery required for a better result. Knowing when to use your knife, methadone, or refractor crystal can be crucial in Synthetik 1. And it's something that comes with a lot of playing. Having your Rosarius proc mid-fight can technically be planned around and played with. But it also just happens. You can't save it for an unforeseen situations. On the same topic of runs blending together. The chip progression sounds cool and will probably be fun. But again more control at the start of the run before things get going and less variation after the run starts is really disheartening to see. Learning to deal with the random bullshit the game gives you is at the very heart of roguelike/lites . Having guaranteed things is fine but if it's not balanced out it becomes overbearing. In Synthetik 1 I would get excited about the prospect of playing Specialist and getting both shotgun systems. And then maybe Kunai too. My entire build would be messing around with all my projectile items and then getting an eminence. Or maybe I would try and get all of the active grenade/explosive items. And not fire my gun ever. Stuff like this just won't happen in a comparable capacity. Another item related thought.

Deciding what items were better or more useful than others in Synthetik 1 was pretty interesting a lot of the time. The the reverbing blade was a lot weaker and tied to Commando instead of Raider, there was a time and point where you would heavily consider selling it. Making room for other things. The same can be said about many other class items. Having only 4 slots competing for room means less room for experimentation. It encourages sticking to the meta as close to possible. In Synthetik 1 there was usually room even in tryhard runs to have 1-2 items (depending on the class) to experiment with.