RIP Forgotten Parachute - The death of a game mode - February 17, 2022

There had been mention of an additional game mode that had been scrapped at the last second during Legends Overload's development, and would have accompanied Boulderball as a new game mode. As promised in previous dev blog posts, this dev blog page was written up to describe why this game mode was cancelled (even though it was not revealed, the existence of a game mode was mentioned).

This mode would have been an Action Mode called Forgotten Parachute.

As the name might imply, the basics of Forgotten Parachute would have involved your character falling from the sky without a parachute, and instead would have brought with them items that were less helpful for surviving the fall, such as refrigerators, billiards tables, bowling balls and couches, among other things (each character would get their own unique item). The main goal was to have used these items in crazy ways while fighting off Force Fighters and helicopters to rack up a high score before your character inevitably smashes into the ground (ignoring that some characters like Pound should be able to fly).

What factors caused Forgotten Parachute to be scrapped?

Shallow gameplay

Having just punches and an item (even if the item could have been used in multiple ways) would have provided little gameplay variety -- despite the "3D" falling, it would have essentially been no different than a standard arena with less enemy variety and less ability variety. Like Onslaught with a time limit, but not needing to even fight in the first place. There would also have been the issue of there being less strategic value and less quick reactions to gameplay options with the way that Forgotten Parachute was shaping up.

Fight or flight -- fake freedom

The original plan was to have Forgotten Parachute give the player the option to fight, flee or rush faster to the ground for more points. However, as the specifics for Forgotten Parachute were laid out more and more, fleeing would have been bad for score, rushing to the ground could have gotten some points, but fighting and using the unique item would have been the best option for score -- which really just goes back to the "Shallow gameplay" points above. Things like Normal/Legend/Legend Plus would have had less significance when forcing the player to fight for score with less options.

Over and done with in 5 minutes

While Onslaught and Boulderball are also meant to be pick-up-and-play modes, they were also able to use the chaos of cars and the Boulder respectively to add to replay value. Forgotten Parachute, despite its aim to also be a chaotic mode, would not have had as much chaotic impact due to the fight/flee/rush choices -- if you can just escape the chaos whenever you want, it takes away the impact of it. When choosing to fight, after having seen every item in use, it would have ended up feeling like just any other ability set, but more limited.

Overall

Forgotten Parachute's mechanics would have relied much more on its theme than its gameplay, and given the amount of work that would have been needed per item per character (with new characters), that would have been a lengthy amount of work that could be applied to a mode with more impact -- two months spent on a weaker mode could have been two months spent on a stronger mode or on more story content.

Other scrapped modes

Forgotten Parachute was not the only mode that was planned during Legends Overload's development -- Forgotten Parachute was actually planned to come out with the Tenebris Expansion (the next expansion), but was "moved up" when two other modes fell apart, largely for the same reasons listed above for Forgotten Parachute.

There was also a lot of work that went into the planning of a What-If story mode (would have been a massive timesink in future expansions due to the number of options per character per path, and had its best moments in certain path combinations) and a proc-gen horror mode (mainly along the same lines as the "Over and done with in 5 minutes" section above).

Why the dev has faith in other modes

A lot of upcoming modes are planned to make use of a combination of the existing battle system and a "vehicle" for the mode itself (like Conquest/Heist having world maps, or the upcoming Naval Conquest to have the boat between battles). For the upcoming modes that are exceptions to this -- Side Stories will likely have some combat, but keep the main focus on story content, while RopeRange is more of a 2008 Demon Rush callback, which is aiming to rely on reactions and chaos (even if it does not stick to the battle system).

It's not all a complete loss, though -- the What-If mode planning did transition into planning for Side Stories, some of the proc-gen horror mode plans might have their place in the upcoming Prison Break, and a good chunk of Forgotten Parachute's planning and work is intended to be used in RopeRange (possibly including replacing the original RopeRange music).