Time Management Mechanic?

Depends, if it was going to be done, will it be a more over-arching type mechanic that plays into the story and is more for flavour (thematically speaking) or will it be done in a direct way that has immediate and perhaps lethal consequences?

I remember playing Shinobi on PS2, that game had an immediate urgency mechanic, your sword devoured souls and in order to devour them you most collect souls from defeated enemies or the sword would eat into your soul (eventually you would take damage and die from this). Boss battles could be particularly annoying because you always had to offset your soul meter with defeating all the adds that would continually spawn so as not to perish during the boss battle.

Sure it created another layer of difficulty and it also pushed you to always be looking for enemies to kill as otherwise you would die. I'm not too sure how that would work in Bloodstained since a core pillar as per IGA's many comments on the subject in various interviews and Kickstarter etc was that exploration is a key factor. So in order to offset this urgency you would either need a cr@p tonne of spawning enemies all the time that were easy to kill (this bit seems plausible based on IGA's dislike for combo kills or a difficulty that bogs you down) or ensure the bar doesn't deplete at a very fast rate (assuming the meter is reset with kills, but it could be picking up 'X' item after enemies die or even finding certain items in the game repeatedly to reset the meter).

It's an interesting mechanic for sure, it can add depth where otherwise the game might feel different without it (there isn't a lot of other things to do in Shinobi in terms of exploration for example). But you need to balance it like crazy. As I said it was annoying in that game, maybe a little too annoying as once I unlocked Musashi I always played as him (so not just for the nostalgia factor!), but in saying that Musashi was massively weaker in terms of his ability to damage enemies with his sword (he has infinite shurikens however), so maybe I am a bit of a masochist? I used to pick hardest difficulty with the weakest character (but didn't have the urgency mechanic to worry about with that character as no soul eating sword...) which made the game ridiculous in terms of difficulty but wiped out urgency.

Another game I played with some form of urgency was Fallout 1 & 2, Fallout 1 was a little more harsh then Fallout 2 in that you had 'X' number of days to complete the first major task you were given (game over if you ran out of time), but in Fallout 2 you would periodically receive dreams that contained a message (story related) about how your village you are trying to save is dying to hunger etc. I played and played that game completing all manner of side quests and never really felt like I was going to run out of time.

So I guess I'm more for the latter and not the former. If it's put into the NM difficulty (assuming it makes it into the final game) I would play it but I hope it doesn't feel akin to Shinobi (PS2).

Anyways that's my take on the subject.

Silver